The Preacher Plan

 Day trading is a business but it's too emotional for me.  Some might call it risky.  The guys who do good at it would say it's not risky you just have to have the right mindset for it.  And it's a mindset that is developed with practice.  But I would call it risky.  Because no matter how good you might think you have your mindset developed, there is always the risk that your emotions of fear and greed will get the best of you.  I like the Dave Ramsey approach better.  Rice and beans, beans and rice.  Save like a crazy man. And it is that plan that has stabilized my business thinking and gotten me out of a fine mess that I had gotten myself into.  So thank you Dave, and I plan on sticking with your plan until the end. 

It is nice that I am able to watch Dave on television every day.  Back in the old days as a kid there certainly wasn't any Dave Ramsey channel that I could flip on the TV any time I felt like it.  But there were books.  There was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.  There was Self Help by Smiley even way back in the day long before my time.  And both books are still here.  Can probably get them on Amazon at the click of a mouse.

So you pay off all of your bills, you get out of debt, you get your emergency fund built up, you get a decent job, you save 15% every paycheck, you build wealth and give.  Now these preachers I've been listening to have an interesting approach to building wealth.  And it is a fine line for a preacher of the gospel to walk, preaching about prosperity right along with the gospel of Jesu Christ.  I was listening to Albert Strang on the Kenneth Copeland show and he had an interesting story.  He said he was a secular reporter but then he began to struggle with his faith wondering how he could remain a secular reporter and still be on fire for God.  And the answer came to him in the form of Charisma magazine.  Now he has just come out with a book called God, Trump, and the 2020 Election.  Good guy and a living example of how you can combine the two.

https://www.charismamag.com/

3,950 visitors per day according to https://myip.ms/

Well I would say that is a pretty good traffic count.  And it has taken 40 years to get there.  He seems to have done good for himself financially.  And that is exactly what they preach.  Howard-Browne says get to a point where you live on the tithe and sow the other 90%.  That sounds like a good place to be.  I will press my numbers down as tight as I can and see if I might be able to even start tithing 10%.  Seems like a big chunk when you are in the worldly mindset.  Dave Ramsey is also big in to giving.  It seems that it is a skill to be developed and practiced and a skill that will come back to you many times over.

Pastor Murray says you are never wasting your time when you are studying the word.  And I think I agree with him.  You can get so caught up in current events, wondering if you are going to be out on the streets or if freedom and liberty in America are going away.  And Dave says he knows people who sold out their retirements at the bottom from fear of the covid.  I rode it out with Dave basically having exactly those fears in my head but just not knowing anything else to do or how to do it so I just did nothing like Dave would recommend and sure enough here 56 or 57 days later the market is back at all time highs.  I checked my 401k which I had figured to turn in to a 201k but sure enough, there it sits at all time highs.

So the plan of the preachers has you in good shape come hell or high water.  So it is the plan of the preachers that I will follow.  Now I have to go and see if I can get a good 10% tithe going to a church that I choose.  And then you have to get it up to 15% and then 20% and eventually to 90%.  That is the preacher plan.  And it goes hard against the worldly man plan.  I am at a stage where I could do it better than many.  It becomes a matter of what is the lowest income that you could live on and still consider yourself to be comfortable and moving forward in your retirement plans at a sufficient rate.

Basically it becomes how greedy you are in your vision of how your life will play out once you are no longer able to work.  As a writer and a network engineer that is only a matter of being able to sit up and write and think clearly and use my hands and fingers on the keyboard and computer.  And that is the same situation that many find themselves in today.  In this age of the computer and information.  Being a network engineer in this age is not a bad thing at all.  It does take work, and it did take work to get to where I am and now I am enjoying the fruits of my labor by collecting the salary that I apparently have capped out at but no longer spending every spare minute outside of my 40 hours in the memorization of technical manuals and books.

So I have time to put my mind on other things.  And then came covid.  So now as Peggy Hall says we start to get our sea legs back underneath us and look around and see where we are.  Obviously as Stephen Strang and Kenneth Copeland say, it is a very important election and the results will mean a hard swing in one direction or the other.  And that could mean my 401k could disappear again.  That is the world we live in.  So Kenneth Copeland and Stephen Strang have their money somewhere.  If they practice what they preach they are giving away lots of it.  And I think they probably do.  Maybe they have it structured where it is being invested into a business.  All businesses deal with this same concern.  This is nothing new, businessmen thinking about their assets and the economy.  In fact there is not anybody alive who does not spend some time thinking about their financial assets and the economy.  It is because in my lifetime everybody has had plenty of food to eat.  If it ever got so bad as to be having to worry about where the food was coming from then everybody's plans kind of get shifted around.

I was thinking how blessed I am to have what I have.  A beautiful home, a nice car, a good job, good health, and money in the bank.  There has never been a time in history where man was not alive and man is the same today as he was when God made him.  I have to believe that.  And in the preacher plan that is premise number one.  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And just knowing that I have never had to face what the men on the lost Franklin Expedition had to face in 1845 on the Victoria Bay in the northern Canadian Arctic.  The story says that they found bones with saw marks and knife marks indicating that the party had turned to cannibalism somewhere along the way.